Perspective From MWC: Movea’s Motion Processing Play

Movea's team sat down with EDN to talk about its roadmap and how its sensor hub architecture fits within a number of market segments catching attention at Mobile World Congress.

If you believe the hype coming out of the Mobile World Congress this week, then design engineers working on anything related to sensors are going to have a field day. Up and down the halls in Barcelona, people are talking about wearables, indoor location mapping, context awareness monitoring, and ultra-low power consumption.

Movea's team sat down with EDN to talk about its roadmap and how its sensor hub architecture fits within a number of market segments catching attention at the show.

One of the main questions on Movea's mind mirrors what many others are wondering: How can the mobile industry -- and, by extension, the electronics industry -- turn sensor data collected via activity monitoring, context awareness, pedestrian dead-reckoning, and mobile gestures into meaningful, personal information?

A first step many companies are looking at is moving power-hungry activities off the mobile phone's application processor, something that has been elevated in importance since Android 4.4 KitKat came out in November 2013. Phone makers increasingly recognize that phones need to support always-on features, said Bob Whyte, Movea's product marketing director. Movea, which provides data fusion and motion processing firmware, software, and IP for the consumer electronics industry, addresses this issue with a reference design architecture that consists of a microcontroller sitting between the sensors and the application processor.